The latest Nikkan Gendai daily e-mail magazine tries to get to the bottom of the recent scandal involving MAFF Minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka’s creative accounting (his funds management body “booked costs totaled 44.76 million over 11 years through 2005” that were supposedly incurred in an official Diet office that members use for free):
[Matsuoka’s] appointment as Minsiter was Bush’s will?!
It’s hard to imagine why the now-desperate Agriculture Minister “Something something regenerated water” Matsuoka was ever appointed to the Cabinet, but getting to the bottom of things, it looks like it was all “the gift of foreign pressure” from the US. Reportedly, the MAFF ministerial post was Matsuoka’s “merit badge” for playing the consensus-building role to re-re-open US beef imports to Japan in July 2006. President Bush, who hails from Texas, a state with a large ranching industry, exerted his will, and ex-PM Koizumi backed him up… or so the story goes. Doesn’t it just seem like that’s what must have taken place? (いかにもありそうな話ではないか。)
Once again I have to appreciate Gendai’s nerve, much in the same way I have to respect Weekly World News for continuing to put Batboy on the cover every week.